How Business Schools Lost Their Way

Too focused on “scientific” research, business schools are hiring professors with limited real-world experience andgraduating students who are ill equipped to wrangle with complex, unquantifiable issues—in other words, thestuff of management.Business schools are on the wrong track. For many years, MBA programs enjoyed rising respectability inacademia and growing prestige in the business world. Their admissions were ever more selective, the paypackages of graduates ever more dazzling. Today, however, MBA programs face intense criticism for failing toimpart useful skills, failing to prepare leaders, failing to instill norms of ethical behavior—and even failing to lead

graduates to good corporate jobs. These criticisms come not just from students, employers, and the media butalso from deans of some of America’s most prestigious business schools, including Dipak Jain at NorthwesternUniversity’s top-ranked Kellogg School of Management. One outspoken critic, McGill University professor Henry

Mintzberg, says that the main culprit is a less-than-relevant MBA curriculum. If the number of reform effortsunder way is any indication, many deans seem to agree with this charge. But genuine reform of the MBAcurriculum remains elusive. We believe that is because the curriculum is the effect, not the cause, of what ails themodern business school.The actual cause of today’s crisis in management education is far broader in scope and can be traced to adramatic shift in the culture of business schools. During the past several decades, many leading B schools havequietly adopted an inappropriate—and ultimately self-defeating—model of academic excellence. Instead ofmeasuring themselves in terms of the competence of their graduates, or by how well their faculties understandimportant drivers of business performance, they measure themselves almost solely by the rigor of their scientific

research. They have adopted a model of science that uses abstract financial and economic analysis, statisticalmultiple regressions, and laboratory psychology. Some of the research produced is excellent, but because so little

of it is grounded in actual business practices, the focus of graduate business education has become increasinglycircumscribed—and less and less relevant to practitioners.

This scientific model, as we call it, is predicated on the faulty assumption that business is an academic disciplinelike chemistry or geology. In fact, business is a profession, akin to medicine and the law, and business schools

are professional schools—or should be. Like other professions, business calls upon the work of many academic

disciplines. For medicine, those disciplines include biology, chemistry, and psychology; for business, they include

mathematics, economics, psychology, philosophy, and sociology. The distinction between a profession and an

academic discipline is crucial. In our view, no curricular reforms will work until the scientific model is replaced by

a more appropriate model rooted in the special requirements of a profession.

Before asking how business education should change, we need to examine its evolution. Most business schools

claim a dual mission: to educate practitioners and to create knowledge through research. Historically, business

schools have emphasized the former at the expense of the latter. In fact, for the first half of the twentieth

century, B schools were more akin to trade schools; most professors were good ole boys dispensing war stories,

cracker-barrel wisdom, and the occasional practical pointer. We remember when MIT’s Sloan School of

Management was known as MIT School of Industrial Management and its production class was taught by the

manager of a nearby General Motors assembly plant. That was a useful, but hardly comprehensive and

professional, education.

Then, in 1959, prompted at least in part by the enormous demand for professional managers in a booming

postwar economy, the Ford and Carnegie foundations issued devastating reports on the woeful state of business

school research and theory. Both foundations recommended ways to give B schools respectable academic

underpinnings and offered grant money toward achieving that end.

The Scientific Model

Virtually none of today’s top-ranked business schools would hire, let alone promote, a tenure-track professor

whose primary qualification is managing an assembly plant, no matter how distinguished his or her performance.

Nor would they hire professors who write articles only for practitioner reviews, like this one. Instead, the best B

schools aspire to the same standards of academic excellence that hard disciplines embrace—an approach

sometimes waggishly referred to as “physics envy.” In departments such as physics and economics, top faculty

members have few responsibilities other than to attend to their disciplines. They are not required to train

practitioners or to demonstrate practical uses of their work; and they are free to do whatever research they

choose and to produce subsequent, even more focused, generations of scholars. In this scientific model, the

university exists primarily to support the scholar’s interests. For the most part, universities accept this

arrangement and the intellectual premise on which it rests: namely, that universities help society advance by

supporting scientists who push back the boundaries of knowledge. They leave the practical implications to others.

It’s very different in schools of law and medicine, which deliberately engage with the outside world. Law schools

expect faculty members to be first-rate scholars; in fact, articles published in law reviews are often cited in trials.

But these institutions also value professors’ ability to teach. Similarly, medical schools carry on advanced

biological research, but most members of the teaching faculty are also practicing doctors.

When applied to business—where judgments are made with

messy, incomplete data—statistical and methodological

wizardry can blind rather than illuminate.

Who Gets Tenure

This new emphasis on scientific research in business schools remains, for the most part, unspoken. Indeed, mostdeans publicly deny it exists, claiming that their schools remain focused on practice, albeit with an increasingawareness of the value of rigorous research. Here we must watch what leaders do, not what they say. At elitebusiness schools, and at the wannabes emulating their practices, the shift toward the centrality of scientificresearch is evidenced almost everywhere.Just look at the hiring and tenure processes. Deans may say they want practitioner-oriented research, but theirschools reward scientific research designed to please academics. By recruiting and promoting those who publishin discipline-based journals, business schools are creating faculties filled with individuals whose main professionalaspiration is a career devoted to science. Today it is possible to find tenured professors of management who havenever set foot inside a real business, except as customers.

Today it is possible to find tenured professors of management

who have never set foot inside a real business, except as

customers.

At many schools, the road to tenure does not run through field work in businesses. Among young academics andtheir advisers, this understanding is explicit. Junior scholars are urged to avoid too much work with practitionersand to concentrate their research on narrow, scientific subjects, at least until late in their quest for tenure. (Whilemany conscientious researchers take it upon themselves to learn about the practice of business after they aretenured, there are few incentives for them to do so.) To be sure, there is merit in suggesting that fledglingfaculty members try their wings before attempting arduous intellectual journeys, but B school research isbecoming too narrow even for academics. One traditional factor in tenure decisions is how often a candidate’swork is cited by other scholars. Paradoxically, deans and tenure committees tell us that the number of citations ofarticles written by candidates is dramatically lower than it was a decade ago—evidence that researchers’ workdoesn’t matter even to their peers.

What Gets Taught

What professors study, and the way they study it, directly affects the education of MBA candidates. As researchoriented

business professors come to dominate B school faculties, they assume responsibility for setting the MBA

curriculum. Not surprisingly, they tend to teach what they know, which often translates into first-class instruction

on methodology and scientifically oriented research. These professors are brilliant fact collectors; but despite their

Worse, the integration of disciplined-based knowledge with the requirements of business practice is left to thestudent. A few years back, the curriculum committee of a highly regarded B school considered a proposal for amultidisciplinary first-semester MBA course based on the current challenges of a well-known global corporation.The committee rejected the proposal—but not because it was poorly designed or pedagogically flawed; in fact,

the committee said it would be an advance over the existing program. The problem, in the words of onefacultymember, was that “we are not qualified to teach it.”

organizations.

Regaining Relevance

In a 1927 address to the American Association of the Collegiate Schools of Business, the philosopher and

mathematician Alfred North Whitehead spoke prophetic words:

Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts: It is a way of illuminating the facts….The tragedy of the world isthat those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feebleimaginations.

Today, Whitehead’s observation is more fitting than ever. If business schools are to regain their relevance, theymust come to grips with the reality that business management is not a scientific disciplinebut a profession, and

they must deal with what a professional education requires. Harvard Business School associate professorRakeshKhurana has pointed out that professions have at least four key elements: an accepted body of knowledge, asystem for certifying that individuals have mastered that body of knowledge before they are allowed to practice,a commitment to the public good, and an enforceable code of ethics. Professions thus are oriented towardpractice and focused on client needs. Above all, professions integrate knowledge and practice. We do not propose

making management a gated profession requiring credentialing and licensing. Nonetheless, we believe ausefulstep toward acknowledging that business is a profession would be to recognize that both imagination andexperience are vital—and ought, therefore, to be central to business education. With an eye toward integratingknowledge and practice, Polaroid’s Edwin Land suggested 50 years ago that every business school should run itsown business. Why shouldn’t business schools operate ventures that function like the equivalent of medicalschoolteaching hospitals? Cornell University’s S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management has recentlyresponded to this long-ignored challenge by establishing the Cayuga MBA Fund, run by students at the ParkerCenter for Investment Research.

The Professional Model

To balance the goals of faculty members with the needs of other constituencies, business schools might look totheir sister professional schools in medicine, dentistry, and law for guidance. Dental education is an apt model tothe extent that it prepares students to deliver a service requiring sophisticated skills and to manage hands-onenterprises. Research is critical to dental education, but it plays a secondary role to the task of educatingcompetent and ethical practitioners. Isn’t that also the right balance for business education?Ultimately, however, we believe business schools would reap the greatest benefit from emulating the mostinnovative law schools. The law is a broad-based activity drawing upon many of the same disciplines relevant tbusiness: economics, psychology, accounting, politics, philosophy, history, sociology, language, literature, and soon. Law schools, however, have not succumbed to physics envy and the scientism it spawns. Instead, they tend

to reward excellence in teaching and in pragmatic writing. Research is an important component of legal practiceand education, but most of it is applied research, and its validity is not equated with the presence of a scientificpatina. Law schools recognize that a well-written book or a well-documented article published in aserious,practitioner-oriented review is as valuable as a quantitative article published in a journal read only by cuttingedgeresearchers. Nevertheless, scientific publications are certainly valued in law school performanceassessments. A law school professor who uses the scientific method to demonstrate that a commonly held beliefis wrong, or to quantify an insight that is counterintuitive, will be rewarded. When assessing the work of lawschool faculty members, evaluators ask questions such as, Is the research important? Is it useful? Is it interestingor original? Is it well thought-out, well argued, and well designed? All of these queries seem more appropriate asstandards for appraising the work of business school faculties than the narrowly defined standard of scientificrigor.

The Professional Model

To balance the goals of faculty members with the needs of other constituencies, business schools might look totheir sister professional schools in medicine, dentistry, and law for guidance. Dental education is an apt model tothe extent that it prepares students to deliver a service requiring sophisticated skills and to manage hands-onenterprises. Research is critical to dental education, but it plays a secondary role to the task of educatingcompetent and ethical practitioners. Isn’t that also the right balance for business education?Ultimately, however, we believe business schools would reap the greatest benefit fromemulating the mostinnovative law schools. The law is a broad-based activity drawing upon many of the same disciplines relevant tobusiness: economics, psychology, accounting, politics, philosophy, history, sociology, language, literature, and soon. Law schools, however, have not succumbed to physics envy and the scientism it spawns. Instead, they tendto reward excellence in teaching and in pragmatic writing. Research is an important component of legal practiceand education, but most of it is applied research, and its validity is not equated with the presence of a scientificpatina. Law schools recognize that a wellwritten book or a well-documented article published in a serious,practitioner-oriented review is asvaluable as a quantitative article published in a journal read only by cuttingedgeresearchers. Nevertheless, scientific publications are certainly valued in law school performance

assessments. A law school professor who uses the scientific method to demonstrate that a commonly held beliefis wrong, or to quantify an insight that is counterintuitive, will be rewarded. When assessing the work of lawschool faculty members, evaluators ask questions such as, Is the research important? Is it useful? Is it interestingor original? Is it well thought-out, well argued, and well designed? All of these queries seem more appropriate asstandards for appraising the work of business school faculties than the narrowly defined standard of scientificrigor.

The problem is not that business schools have embraced

scientific rigor but that they have forsaken other forms of

knowledge.